Sir William (14 page)

“As to that, the first object is to be happy.”

“It is,” said his sister-in-law,
“not.”
She had never before heard a doctrine so shocking.

Mary Dickenson, having met Emma, felt otherwise.

“I have always liked what you have written on a certain delicate subject, and you and I think very much alike,” said Sir William gratefully.

*

Emma had not much cared for the look of the cliffs at Dover. Like the English temperament, they may not be pure white, but they look white, and they have a cold and decided hauteur which does not welcome the invader. In Italy, she was what she was. Here she was only what she had come from. And besides, Italy was warmer.

Sir William was annoyed. “Why should I not please her? She has pleased me. Besides, I do not exist solely that Charles may have his inheritance. That does not seem to have occurred to him.”

Indeed it had not. For to Charles, everything in this world must have its reason, and in this matter he saw none.

“She does not know,” said Mary Dickenson, who had asked Sir William and Emma to the country for the weekend, but spoke mostly to her uncle.

“Doesn’t know what?”

“Anything. She is innocent. But there is hope. Her left hand has been busy recently, and when it needs help, I suppose the right will have to know. So why not ask for it, when the time comes, and see?”

“Mary!”

“Why not? It is what you want to do, whether you know it or not. And I must confess that when I think how much it will displease Cousin Charles, I almost condone it.”

In the young, impatience is merely anticipation; in the old, the knowledge that there is not much time left; in the world, both. But having enunciated this apothegm, Sir William found himself unwilling to be hustled along, though it was late to tarry. The first is done for us, and the second by us. Perhaps he merely wished to retain for as long as possible the illusion of choice.

*

“I hope,” said Mary’s husband to Emma, “that Sir William will find Emma and Lady H.
the
same
.” For Mary’s husband was no fool either.

*

“I am very glad you have seen Sir W. Hamilton comfortably and had time for conversation, tho’ probably the
Lady
was in the way,” said Lady Frances Harper in a loud, shrill voice. “I believe it likely she may be our aunt. My mother seemed to fear it. Do you think it likely?
I
own
I
think
not;
for making a
shew
of her
Graces
and
Person
to
all
his
acquaintance
in
Town
does not appear a
preliminary
for
marriage.
”

Whatever else one may say for it, this is not the tone in which one dissuades a distinguished, independent and famous relative from doing as he pleases.

*

Emma had gone off to see Romney, who felt less delighted than he had hoped to. She was not quite the same Emma, that was why.

The English lack—their culture is based upon its absence—the bump of admiration. But she was the latest sensation, which is something else again. A sensation is permitted to wax warm, for it will pass. Her attitudes were unique. Her contralto was the correct oratorio rumble and left the stemware intact. The secret of her success was in request.

“A particular friend of mine,” wrote Sir Thomas Lawrence, “promised to get me introduced to Sir. W. H.’s to see this wonderful woman you have doubtless heard of—Mrs. Hart.” He had been in London five years earlier when she was there, but apparently he had not heard of her then, or if he had, had not listened, the name then
being as hard to catch as it was now impossible not to drop.

“George, you may paint me as ‘The Ambassadress,’” said Emma, and preened.

“I expect Sir Thomas will be doing that.” The only thing a really creative person has to teach is himself, and she had outgrown him; although it was very gratifying to have her call, and he would do the portrait, of course.

“However did you guess? He has particularly demanded to take my likeness next week.”

Lawrence, using an old canvas, daubed her in over an allegory of Liberality guided by Sagacity, a work by Reynolds. He was not without a sense of humor, and as he had supplanted Reynolds in other things, why not in this, as well?

“Her acting was simple, grand, terrible and pathetic,” said Romney. But why, oh why must she act now, here in the studio, where once they had been content to play?

Or maybe she could no longer help it.

*

Even Horace Walpole approved, that man who approbated only the Artificial and the Misses Berry. “I make
amende
honorable
to Mrs. Hart,” he said. “Her Attitudes are a whole theatre of grace and various expressions.”

“Everything she did was just and beautiful,” said the Duchess of Devonshire, “but her conversation, though perfectly good-natured and unaffected, was uninteresting, and her pronunciation very vulgar.”

Who would think so much could come of a mere Attitude? Things were indeed coming on. And even George had cheered up, the silly old thing, and was painting her again as everything—as Joan of Arc, as Magdalen, as Constance. Only the King remained to be consulted.

Hamilton waited upon him at Windsor. The result was a compromise. If the Queen would not receive her, the King would not object; if the King did not object, the Queen would not receive her. Thus whim and honor both were satisfied. A devoted couple, the Royal Pair were astute at compromise.

“Sir William,” said Emma, “has proposed.”

“To think that I should see the day,” said Mrs. Cadogan. She had not interfered. She had not hoped. She had been sure.

“Oh the good, good man,” she added perfunctorily, and blew her nose.

“And had I not something to do with it?” Emma was indignant.

“Indeed you had, but that is not something a woman confesses to, if she be wise,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“I am glad,” said Lord Bristol, all Bishop of Derry again, and so appropriately benign, “that you have secured your own happiness.”

“Sir William has actually married his gallery of statues. They are set out on their return to Naples,” wrote Horace Walpole, elaborating, even while he purified, his style. It was one of his celebrated letters, he had not as yet decided to whom.

*

And so he had, at Marylebone Church, in the presence of Lord Abercorn and the secretary to the British Minister to the Court of Savoy. Greville did not attend.

If we do these things at all, we may just as well do them in church. But still, her sense of accomplishment, though concealed, diverted him, and since no man rushed into the church to show just cause, he went on with it and it was soon done. He had only wanted to give pleasure; therefore, the quicker out of England the better.

With unusual prudence, Emma had signed the register with her name by birth. She wished to be sure.

*

She had brought it off. It felt much the same as not being married, only with something left out, but she was now secure. On the last day before they left, she posed for George once more.

“Tell Hayley I am always reading his
Triumphs
of
Temper.
It was that that made me Lady H., for God knows I have had five years to try my temper,” she
said. “I am afraid if it had not been for the good example Serena taught me, my girdle would have burst. If it had, I had been undone, for Sir W. minds temper more than beauty.”

“Emma,” said George, painting a stranger. “The Gods have been kind to you. You have never been in love.”

“I dote on Sir William,” said Emma indignantly, whom this one small point had perhaps been bothering.

“Ah, that’s not loving,” said George. “That’s not the same thing at all. That only comes afterward, or without, or never.”

He wanted to lay his brushes down. Spoiled by success? he thought. Nonsense, I was spoiled by my failure. We lose our talents when we lose heart, that’s all. It’s merely a matter of character. For most of us there comes a time, not when we wish to make little legends—we’re wiser than that—not to push away the bad things, but to soften their edges, to make an idyll out of pain, to show what it could have been, even to pretend that was the way it was. Or is. We enter into illusion the way a condemned man takes up residence in the death row. For who can paint against a spinning wheel?

At least she was still loving. “George,” she said, “you shall come to Naples and paint me as often as you like. Would you enjoy that? It will be like old times.”

“Yes, I should like that,” said George, and never saw her again.

*

On the last night of their stay, Sir William and she went to the theatre, where everyone ogled them and there was even a play for them to ogle. The leading actress was Jane Powell. Emma did not tell Sir William who Jane Powell was, but went backstage after the performance, by herself, to meet her; and then the congratulations were truly meaningful, or at any rate their meaning was underlined, overscored, kept private and enhanced, for they had been fellow servants at Dr. Budd’s in the old days, Jane Powell and she. Tears, joy, accomplishment, were all their conversation.

“I always said you did not lack ability,” said Jane
Powell, speaking as one woman to another, which is to say as a professional actress.

“And I, that you were then my ideal,” said Emma, relaxed and therefore plainly lying.

“I
knew
,” said Jane Powell, simply.

“Your rise, though rapid, even to the callow eye of youth, was yet predictable,” said Emma.

So since Jane
knew
and Emma had risen, they corresponded for a year or two, in the moistest of terms. It does not do to lose touch with old friends, and besides, the acting profession is uncertain.

U
SUALLY DURING AN INTERREGNUM
, it is the King who leaves, the people who stay behind. But in France, it was the people who had flocked out of the capital to hiss and boo and gouge each other’s eyes out; the King and Queen who had been left stranded.

Through the streets of Paris, His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Court of the Two Sicilies clattered over the cobbles toward modern times. The King and Queen had tried to flee, but had been hauled back from Varennes to promulgate the Constitution; a symbolic scene, which is to say, the Constitution was handed to the King, the King handed the Constitution to the members of the National Assembly, and the National Assembly kept it. As for the people themselves, they were not present, but off somewhere looting houses, rioting for bread, and shouting
Liberté,
Égalité,
Fraternité
:
Liberté,
because it belongs in a straitjacket, or at any rate a lot of people who did were clearly at liberty;
Égalité,
because it does not exist, for we are not born equal—a few of us are born with brains;
Fraternité,
because though it is an amiable notion, no one practices it, least of all the French. Give them a fine phrase, and the people will die for it, whereas no one will fight for a good dinner, and if he has one, is too comfortable to do so.

“I will tell you what the French have done, they have
made me weep for a King of France, which I never thought to do; and they have made me sick of the very name of Liberty, which I never thought to be,” said the poet Cowper, who was gently mad, saw God in the garden, was fond of playing with hares—though not of starting them—and could usually be returned to sanity by his companion, Mrs. Unwin.

Sir William and Emma were quite acceptable to what was left of the French Court, for the snobs had been the first to leave, and those left behind, needing British aid, could scarcely afford to be snobbish. But Emma was disappointed.

This large-jawed foolish woman with the inane blue eyes could look regal when she wished. Such was her childhood training. At the moment she was trying to impress upon Maria Carolina, her sister, by means of her sister’s envoy, that she, too, could sway whole empires if she chose, no matter what went on outside the window. If she had learned to tremble, she did not show it, for it is France is the plum, not the Two Sicilies. She presented a letter, her last, to her sister, and a jewel or two, and went away.

Besides, nothing was wrong. It was only that the gardeners had been overworked recently, and underpaid. There had been a famine somewhere. And chambermaids who do not come are merely feckless creatures, not amazons who storm the barricades and, once they have lost their looks, put their daughters out for hire. If trees were chopped down in Versailles park, the weather was cold, it was done for kindling wood, because they knew no better. One did what one could to help. One encouraged industry. One ordered a new necklace from one’s jeweler and tried to show that one was not afraid. One did one’s duty.

*

“Did you notice their stockings?” asked Sir William as they came away. His face in repose did not look reposed.

“Whose stockings?”

“Everybody’s. They had runs and they stank. There is
either something wrong with the laundresses, or else they have at last learned that the Sun King is dead, and the sooner out of France, the better.”

He directed the coach to Naples as fast as they could get there, for Naples is backward and out of date, and so life is still pleasant there, forgetful that even those notoriously indifferent travelers, the French, may also leave France, if they so choose, in that latest and most convenient of conveyances, the world’s first modern conscription army.

However, when Gaeta came in view, he cheered up. Nothing had changed. The farther south you go, the less it does. It might even be wise to plan a visit to Sicily.

“But why were they shut up like that, like prisoners?” asked Emma.

“Because they were caught,” said Sir William, and looked out the window at the lustrous shores of what might very well be the last large private kingdom in the world, run down perhaps, but still in the possession of the original owners; not farmed for profit, not a pantisocracy, not anything really, except what it was.

“I wonder how Graffer and the English garden are coming,” he said, for you cannot explain politics to a woman. She merely looks sympathetic and tells you what to do. She will not listen.

The English garden was doing excellently. Not only was it suddenly popular—for with France gone we will need allies—but it had taken root.

“After knowing Naples, it is impossible not to wish to
live
in order that one may return to it,” Sir William had said, in bed in England with a cold. “If I were compelled to be a king, I would choose it for my kingdom. The storms which desolate Europe pass over his head without injury.”

Though there certainly seemed to be more English visitors about than usual.

“It appears to me that education in England does not improve. They lead here exactly the same life they lead at home. But since they are here, I suppose they must be given dinner.”

“Yes, Hamilton” said Emma, addressing her husband for the first time with the form suitable to her new station. In her lap was a silver bowl full to the brim with cards left on the Embassy. The more elegant among them had engraved on them in purple or black ink small views of their owners’ estates, which was the current fashion and so much taken up by the swollen fop, the lesser gentry and nobodies, if rich. She was still wearing the gown in which she had been presented at Court.

“My dear,” said Maria Carolina, stretching out both hands, “you made it. I am so proud of you. And my congratulations, by the way, on the clever skill with which you brought it off.”

Emma curtsied. But of course it had not been like that. That was just a fantasy. What the Queen had actually said was, “How pretty. My dear, you must come to see me soon, and we will talk.”

It had been a levee. Levees are impersonal. She and Sir William moved away, but Emma carried herself with quite a different air now. In England, either one was defiant or else one stooped. But to enter Naples again was to enter the world from a tunnel—a little higher in France than England, but not much—and at last to see the sun ahead and then stand upright in it.

The Queen wished a new alliance, as did Acton, so of course Emma would be made much of. To the Queen, politics was still an intimate affair, akin to recreation, but with the enhanced annoyance of dealing with people when what you needed were pawns.

*

Greville had sent Sir William a letter, sending in the bill for the upkeep of Emma’s child. It came to £65/6/8. He had promised Emma to see that it was taken care of.

“I think,” said Sir William, “you had best read this, my dear.” And watched her while she did.

“Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“Is it yours?”

Emma hesitated. “Yes.”

“Is it his?”

She shook her head. In some cases it is better to lie with the head, and the Lord grant it was no lie.

“Then there is some hope for it,” said Sir William, paid the bill, and dropped the letter into the wastepaper basket. “However, since we must pay for our mistakes in this world, the sum will be deducted from your pin money. To which,” he added, with a crinkle of amusement, “I will now compound the yearly sum of sixty-five pounds, six shillings and eightpence.”

But he made no break with Greville. He merely became more observant.

Emma decided to make Greville her commission agent. “Sir William has asked me that you buy five yards of the new grosgrain ribbon for a hat.” “Dear Greville, will you send out, please, a hip tub, for Sir William’s bath?” Greville detested errands, but as a dutiful nephew, would feel compelled to run them.

Sir William watched these commissions pile up with some awe. “My dear, what will you think of next?” he asked mildly.

“Oh I don’t know. Something impractical to deliver, difficult to carry, and wellnigh impossible to procure, I expect,” said Emma, whose pin money was now five times the household expenses at Edgware Row, and her private apartments the size of the house.

“I see,” said Sir William, thoughtfully. It was a new Attitude, but as usual, she forgot it. You never saw any of these facets for long. Who cares whether it be forgetting or forgiving, so long as the subject is not brought up?

The Chevalier de Seingalt came through, his sleeves a mass of dirty lace, already accumulating his memoirs. “A clever man marrying a young woman clever enough to bewitch him,” he noted. “Such a fate often overtakes a man of intelligence when he grows old. It is, always a mistake to marry, but when a man’s physical and mental forces are declining, it is a calamity.” The first part of this dictum was taken out of any comedy by Gozzi, the second was the current wisdom of the day and therefore his own apothegm. It had to be owned, however, that the physical and mental forces did not seem to have declined much. Unlike his nephew, Sir William had not the art of running dry. He hoped to die a mortal, not bleached wood.

He was assembling the catalogue of his new Etruscan vases. In the morning, he looked at the vases; in the afternoon, he received the engravers; in the evening, those who would provide the letter press. “I do not mean to write a book, but to furnish matter for many,” he said. What he did plan to do, in time, was to sell the collection, for if you have a real enjoyment of such things, it is best to explain that you indulge the interest only for commercial reasons, so that, thinking you tasteless, the connoisseur will leave you free to enjoy your tastes instead of trying to overwhelm you with his own, which are, of course, superior.

Nothing must be allowed to impinge upon taste, though the King was an exception, since he arrived only to take Sir William away. The impingement took the form of a
grand
battu.
Hunting alone interested him. And hunting wants taste. “Those acts and functions which are never mentioned in England, here are openly performed,” Sir William reported in a dispatch home.

Ferdinand shot from the safety of a pavilion toward which the game was driven, so the only exercise he got was butchering the meat, a chore he relished and therefore one at which he was competent.

To the left stood a pile of bowels and offal, high as a man, and constantly added to. It was made up of the innards of on the average a thousand deer, a hundred
wild boar, two or three wolves and as many foxes. At a trestle table stood the King, stark naked except for a brown-leather butcher’s apron, his white skin splattered with blood. Two lackeys slung a carcass on the table. The King slit open its guts, flung the viscera to the offal heap, disjointed the corpse and called for another one. The Queen, who was sometimes forced to attend at these rituals, did her best to ignore them, but had no lady in waiting to talk to. No lady in waiting could stand it.
Flop
down on the trestle table went the next corpse. Over the offal pile hovered a buzzing corona of bluebottles. From time to time, finding his hands too slippery to hold the knife, Ferdinand would wash them in a bowl and call for a towel. This entertainment went on from dawn till dusk, unless he went fishing instead. He was an enormous man with a powerful chest.

At intimate dinners, which Sir William had to attend three or four times a week, the conversation was of the day’s hunt. But Ferdinand was a most popular sovereign. Among the people his nickname was
il
Nasone.
And it must be confessed that though a frightful coward, he meant no harm.

The Queen’s sport was Government. If the King objected, Maria Carolina put on her white kid gloves. They were the means to power. Ferdinand was a fetishist. No one knew why. The condition had merely arisen. She had only to don elbow-length gloves, and he would slobber, grow affectionate, and do as she wished. If he seemed reluctant, she slapped him with them, and that invariably made him behave.

She marveled at this singular weapon sometimes. She would have liked to know the cause of it. It is often wise to know on what foundations the power we wield rests. But possibly he did not know himself. Needless to say, the wearing of white kid gloves at Court was the prerogative of the Queen. The possession of a pair, particularly on the part of any current mistress, was tantamount to treason.

Usually she had the gloves sent from Vienna, paid for out of the Secret Fund. “Never forget,” Maria Theresa
had told her, “that you are a German.” She never had. She did not cheat in an Italian way. An English alliance seeming advisable, she sent for Emma daily.

“The Queen,” said Sir William, “receives her most kindly. Emma very naturally told her the whole story and that all her desire was by her future conduct to show her gratitude to me, and to prove to the world that a young, beautiful woman, though of obscure birth, could have noble sentiments and act properly in the great world.” One’s best suit is the truth, so long as one does not lay down all of it.

My God, thought Greville, whose eye had caught the word Queen, I have given shelter to a fiend, but since Sir William could not live forever, pushed on with improvements at Milford Haven and told him as little as possible, except that cash would be short this year.

The revolution in France, which did not concern any of them, continued to revolve.